Our Dreams Pursue Our Dead
by LarielRomeniel
Summary: I dream of the dead." 9th and 10th Doctors.


**Author's Note**: Written for the "Writer in a TARDIS" challenge on LiveJournal. I don't own it.

_Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,  
Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find._

--A.C. Swinburne, "Ave atque Vale," lines 94-95

It happened the first time after Utah and the Dalek. Rose should have been asleep. She certainly was tired enough to sleep for days. But every time she closed her eyes, her head was filled with the sights and sounds of the day: the screams of the dying, the Dalek's pitiful last moments, the madness in the Doctor's eyes.

With a sigh, she got out of bed. A cup of tea would help. She pulled on a dressing gown and headed toward the kitchen.

A sharp cry made her stop and look around. _Adam?_ There was a second cry, _not_ from the direction of Adam's room. The cry trailed off into a moaning sound. There were words in there, but nothing she could understand.

She followed the sound down a corridor she'd never used before, to a dimly lit room where the Doctor was sprawled over a sofa. He was asleep, but not relaxed. She could see the tension in his body. He shifted, shaking his head back and forth and muttering. Sometimes it sounded like he was asking a question, and sometimes it sounded like he was calling names. She drew closer as she watched and listened, trying to make sense of what he was saying. She startled when he sat up and cried out again. He collapsed back down onto the cushions, still trembling, still wrapped in nightmare.

Rose knelt down beside him and slipped her hand into his. She jumped again when his eyes snapped open and fixed her with a blue stare.

"Why are you here?" he demanded in a harsh voice scratchy with sleep. His hand held hers in a tight grip.

"I…You're hurting me, Doctor!" He relaxed his grip but didn't release her hand. "I heard you. I was worried."

He sighed as he moved to sit up. "It happens sometimes. I see them, and hear them in my dreams."

She wrinkled her brow. "Who do you hear?"

She could feel his hand trembling as he answered, "Everyone I've lost. Everyone the Daleks took from me." He dropped his head so she couldn't see his face. "You wondered why I don't sleep much. I dream of the dead."

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

He looked up at her again with pained eyes. "It could have been you, Rose."

She hugged him. "But it wasn't. And it won't ever be. The Daleks are gone."

She held him until she felt him relax in her embrace.

-0-

It happened again after they lost Jack.

He was thrashing in his sleep, and calling out. This time she knew he was calling names, because one of them was _Jack_. Did that mean he was dead after all?

It was worse than the last time. She didn't want to think it was because they'd lost Jack, that Jack had joined the Doctor's dead.

Perhaps it was because of the stress of regeneration and the fight with the Sycorax.

Perhaps it was because he'd died himself this time.

She went to his side quickly. This new body didn't wake when she took his hand in the midst of his nightmare. Instead, he rolled toward her, and she automatically put her arms around him, holding him until he stilled in her arms.

-0-

The third time was the worst time. They'd made love that night, but it wasn't joyful as it had been before. He held her tightly, desperately, and she kept thinking about what he'd said just a few hours before. _A storm is approaching._

His anguished shout jolted her awake to see him staring at her with wild eyes. It had been her name he'd cried out this time. He pulled her against his chest with a crushing grip. She could feel him shaking.

"I'm going to lose you too, Rose," he whispered. "Just like the others."

"You can't lose me that easily," she said, soothing his shivers with a gentle hand up and down his spine. But she remembered only too well that the Beast had said she was going to die.

This time, he didn't relax, and neither did she.

-0-

Now the dreams were hers, robbing her of sleep and frightening her mother, who tried everything she knew to calm her. But the tea that had once saved the world couldn't soothe her troubled mind.

"You have to move on, sweetheart," Jackie would tell her.

She was trying. She really was, throwing herself into her work at Torchwood every day. But she couldn't control her dreams of the Doctor, alone with no one to hold him through his own nightmares.

-0-

The time came when she hardly had time for sleep, let alone for dreams. The stars were going out, and no one could figure out why. Torchwood's scientists were at a loss. Religious leaders were saying it was the end of the world.

Rose had heard that before, in both universes. But this time she wasn't so sure that they were wrong.

"We need to find the Doctor," her father said. He handed her a thick binder. "This is a project that we abandoned years ago, when he told us it was damaging our world."

She looked at the binder's cover. It was titled _Dimension Cannon Project_. Flipping it open, she quickly found the project's summary and scanned it, then looked back up at him with wide eyes.

Pete Tyler smiled slightly. "I'm willing to risk a little global warming if it means keeping the sun from going out. I want you to manage the project. All right?"

Rose dropped the binder to her desk so she could hug her father. "More than all right," she said.

_I'm coming to get you, Doctor._


End file.
